Byron York: Cuts to defense can be made

Republicans, and many Democrats, are upset by the prospect of sequestration cuts to the nation's defense budget. As it turned out, Congress put them off for two months.

Sequestration would force the government to reduce spending by about $1.2 trillion over the next decade. Roughly $600 billion would come from defense - a hugely disproportionate amount to take from the Pentagon. And the cuts would be the worst possible sort: everything slashed, across the board, good programs and bad.

That's no accident. Sequestration was designed to be so awful that Congress would find a better way to cut spending. So far, that hasn't happened.

But just because sequestration cuts are bad doesn't mean the defense budget should be sacrosanct. In fact, there are billions of dollars in Pentagon spending that can be cut without compromising the military's effectiveness.

Maintaining national security requires underwriting a lot of departments: Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and countless others. But looking just at the Defense Department, the Obama administration this year plans to spend (without sequestration) $550 billion on the basic operations of the Pentagon, plus $88 billion on the war in Afghanistan - a total of $638 billion.

Back in 2007, the Pentagon's base budget was $431 billion, with $132 billion added for the war in Iraq and $34 billion for Afghanistan - a total of $597 billion. Given it was a peak year because of a costly troop surge, is there any reason the U.S. should be spending more on the Pentagon's base budget today, than it did in 2007?

"If we go back to '07, we had the Army we have today, and it was surging in Iraq ..." says one senior GOP Senate aide. "No one in '07 was screaming that we didn't have enough money for the military."

How to get back to those 2007 levels? Watchdog groups, along with Republican Tom Coburn, the Senate's leading budget hawk, have plenty of suggestions.

The Pentagon is building several versions of the F-35 fighter plane. Models specific for the Navy and the Marines have been "plagued by cost overruns ... and are now estimated to cost just under $200 million each," according to a report by Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Project on Government Oversight. Replacing the two extra models of the basic F-35 with the F/A-18 fighter could save about $61 billion over the next decade.

Then there is outside services contracting, a practice that has nearly tripled in cost since 2000. Coburn points out that "reducing Department of Defense spending on service contracts by 15 percent over the next 10 years would still leave contract spending at approximately the level it was in 2007 ..." Doing so would save $370 billion over the next 10 years.

In all, Coburn envisions a possible $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. Republicans decrying the sequestration cuts should remember the Pentagon budget still needs to be reduced - just in the right way.

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Byron York: Cuts to defense can be made

Republicans, and many Democrats, are upset by the prospect of sequestration cuts to the nation's defense budget. As it turned out, Congress put them off for two months.